Analysis: Tax Inefficiencies only tell half the story

The New Zealand Initiative has released a report slamming the Government's spending as inefficient and wasteful, but there’s more to the numbers than meets the eye, Thomas Coughlan reports for Newsroom..

A new report from thinktank The New Zealand Initiative into government spending comes with with the headline-grabbing tagline that up to a third of state expenditure is "wasteful".

That calculation is taken from a 2013 report published by the Canadian libertarian thinktank, the Fraser Institute. It used metrics of outcomes in areas like health, education and economic performance to measure what governments achieved for their level of spending.

That report found that South Korea had the lowest government spending per capita.